Yes, drug users do end up becoming drug dealers. It’s a complicated mess I don’t claim to understand completely. But when we talk about drug dealers, we’re not talking about wealthy Columbian kingpins living on a yacht somewhere– we’re talking about drug addicts who became addicted for any number of reasons and then found themselves homeless and desperate. If they have more heroin than they’re going to use right away, they don’t save it in a sock drawer. They sell it to other addicts. It’s easy to say you wouldn’t do the same– but again, you have no way of knowing that.
Max sold some heroin to a woman he knew. The two of them shot up together– he injected her, in fact. It wasn’t her drug of choice; she’d only been an alcoholic previously. She was severely depressed and her family suspected she was suicidal. It could be that she had asked for a lethal dose of heroin to end it all, or it could have been a mistake. Max didn’t remember much about that night when he woke up the next morning. The only thing anyone really knows for sure is that Max had sold his aunt, my friend’s alcoholic younger sister, a dose of heroin that killed her. She left behind two little children.
There are so many people to be furious with, reading this story. I was sick with anger when I heard it had happened. I was sick when I babysat for Max’s little brother while my friend was at the funeral. I was sick when my friend went to the courthouse and begged the judge to send her son to rehab instead of prison. I was sick when I heard the police followed my friend to her house, pulled Max off the sofa where he was lying in more pain than I can describe– actually trying to ride out heroin withdrawal and be clean for enough days that any rehab facility would take him– and took him to jail in spite of her pleading.
But I ask you: at this point in the story, what good would have been accomplished by killing Max?
If the police had dragged him off the sofa and shot him in the back yard instead of taking him to jail, who would have benefited from that?
If the judge had sentenced him to death, who would have benefited from that? Max? His mother? His baby brother? His aunt who was already dead, or her children? Society in general?
Who would have benefited from Max’s death?
Because this is what you’re asking for, when you ask for drug dealers to be executed. You’re not asking for the execution of scary strangers who give drugs to foolish children on the playground, because those people don’t exist outside of made-up scenarios in DARE classes. You’re not asking for the execution of foreigners running opium across the border. Those people won’t go on trial in the United States. You’re not asking for the execution of affluent, sadistic monsters who sell drugs to addicts without touching the stuff themselves. Affluent people don’t get the death penalty. Affluent people can afford lawyers who get them reduced sentences. You’re asking for the execution of powerless people trapped in the labyrinth of drug addiction. They are the ones a judge is going to make an example of. They are the ones who will be killed, if it’s legal to kill people for selling drugs that result in deaths.
Is that what you want?
Why do you want that?
Why would it be better than the nightmare that’s happening now?
Why would it be better than having compassion and treating drug addiction like the serious illness it is, instead of a moral failing?
Max didn’t die, not that day. He did end up in rehab eventually. He got clean. He lived several more years, but his body was so ravaged by the effects of the drug that he died very young. And his mother and baby brother were devastated.
I don’t see who benefited from that either.
I don’t see why our whole society can’t run a different way.
But just taking matters exactly as they are today: the death penalty for drug dealers means legalized murder of drug addicts.
Is that really what you want?
(image via Pixabay)
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